In the transmission of streams of information bits in communication systems error correction codes and modulation schemes are required. One modulation scheme that is typically implemented is QAM. Error correction codes that often complement QAM are turbo codes, concatenated codes, convolutional codes, low density parity check (LDPC) codes or the like.
To decode a turbo coded QAM signal, a turbo decoder comprising of two maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoders, requires knowledge of the log-likelihood ratio of the received turbo coded bits. An approach to determine log-likelihood ratios for 16-QAM signals is disclosed in Goff et al., “Turbo-codes and High Spectral Efficiency Modulation”, Proceedings of ICC, p. 645-649, May 1994.
In conventional systems, the computational complexity to calculate exact log-likelihood ratios is high, and approximations lead to degradation in receiver sensitivity.
Currently there is no known technology that provides a system or method for computing exact log-likelihood ratios for coded QAM signals without introducing a significant amount of computational complexity.